


Memento Mori

by jeanshorts



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Apocalypse, End of the World, M/M, Other, Psychological Something, more atmosphere than plot, philosophy?, vignette-ish?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 07:32:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16300760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeanshorts/pseuds/jeanshorts
Summary: [B44] As the universe folds and collapses, Chanyeol and Baekhyun escape into the tesseract, where their world is unlimited and time is infinite.





	Memento Mori

Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t the astronomers. Conspiracy theorists predicted it first. The scientific community only confirmed what they already knew was coming, what was so close you could see it through a cardboard telescope.

 

The scientists say it’s a privilege to watch the world die. It was impossible for people to watch the universe expand into creation, from a tiny speck of dust to a sudden, beautiful explosion of light and darkness and matter and antimatter.  _ But _ , they say,  _ but _ we can watch it in reverse. At least part of it, at least whatever they can see before their synthetic atmosphere gives out and they’re inexorably sucked back into the darkness from whence they came. Any reversing of the universe they witness before that is fair game.

 

And it’ll be beautiful. Or, if not beautiful, it’ll satisfy all our scientific curiosities. Or, failing that, it’ll at least be poetic. Dying, not alone, not of some meaningless disease or accident, but dying together, dying with everyone you ever loved, dying with the cosmos.

 

Baekhyun thinks the scientists are fucking crazy, the whole goddamn lot of them. Along with the philosophers, the therapists, the bloggers, the disgusting drunkards in bars preaching acceptance of the inevitable. It seems like the day everyone learned about the end of the world, the world became doomed to end miserably. It’s actually quite helpful in mitigating Baekhyun’s debilitating fear of the apocalypse. Every day there are at least three new people who claim to have the blueprints to Noah’s ark, and every day Baekhyun craves the flood just a tiny bit more.

 

Baekhyun knows he’s quite the fucking misanthrope, so there aren’t many people he doesn’t find crazy in one way or another, but it was never this bad before. Maybe, just maybe, Baekhyun would have been able to handle the end of the world. The idea of absolutely  _ nothing _ existing anymore is one that takes some getting use to, but maybe he could do it. It would be a change in everything he’s ever believed, but he’s handled change before, and there isn’t much choice but to accept this. But there’s only so much disruption he can handle.

 

The news of the inevitable collapse of the universe turned the world upside down, and it shakes Baekhyun to his very core. Sanity got a “best before” date, and they’ve long since passed it. Everywhere he goes, places are closing down. People quit their jobs, people are dying in hoards. The one thing that kept people in control, the idea of the future, is powerless to hold people back now. This newfound recklessness, this newfound lack of self-preservation has infected people like some mind-eating disease, and the lack of concern people have for their own lives, in this pursuit of the exhilaration they’ve always wanted but were too prudent to chase, causes the death toll to go up immeasurably. And no amount of money can convince anyone to do the measuring anymore. When time finally becomes the most valuable thing on the planet it becomes disqualified as a currency, because no one can be tricked into giving it up anymore.

 

Some professions still remain. Some businesses still stand. These are usually the smaller places that provide for its workers something more than money. A sense of security, perhaps a sort of family. Baekhyun envies that. That’s the strongest bulwark there is, and Baekhyun’s been left vulnerable.

 

The trains have stopped. Summer used to run in people’s veins, charge them with this hopeful warmth that kept them smiling at strangers, kept them dressing their best hoping to find someone to impress, kept them participating in life. Baekhyun loved it. It pumped him full of hope too, year after year. But now it’s been replaced. This new fear of the inevitable feels like static, like that hair raising touch that you know isn’t there, but is tangible all the same. It’s restlessness. That’s what the feeling is. Restlessness mixed with fear. For everyone else, it may be fear of death. But for Baekhyun, it’s mostly fear of change.

 

This is the fear that prompts him to find Chanyeol that summer morning. This is the gun pressing into his back as he drags Chanyeol to his father’s lab.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

He pokes his fingers through the holes in Chanyeol’s sweater.

 

“Knitted sweaters are a good look on you,” Baekhyun says.

 

Chanyeol reaches out with one hand, petting over Baekhyun’s cheeks and nose. ”Everything’s a good look on me,” he says. Baekhyun huffs out a chuckle.

 

They’re in Baekhyun’s room, like they always are. Baekhyun’s bed is big enough for three people, but Baekhyun presses himself close to Chanyeol regardless, one leg thrown over Chanyeol’s waist and fingers playing with Chanyeol’s sweater, bunching it up to reveal his abs.

 

“Did I ever tell you what my dad did his PhD research on?” Baekhyun asks, his eyes on Chanyeol’s sweater.

 

“No, why?”

 

“It was on mind uploading. He used to tell me about it because I liked thinking about it as a kid and kept asking him. Last week, I found his paper. It’s pretty cool,” Baekhyun says.

 

“What does it say?”   
  
Baekhyun wraps the sweater around one finger, forming a  thick bundle of knitted yarn. “There are rules,” Baekhyun says. “The tesseract is made for two people. One can go in alone, but he would likely go crazy from having no frame of reference for reality. No one can trust themselves to keep themselves from stepping over the brink of insanity, but if two people trusted each other, they could each keep the other in check.”

 

Chanyeol tugs at his own sweater.

 

“He calls it the tesseract,” Baekhyun continues. “Like a square is two dimensional, and a cube is three dimensional, the tesseract is four dimensional. It’s the closest we’ll ever get to dealing with the fourth dimension, which is time. It doesn’t change time, but by uploading our consciousness into this enclosed space, it’s the closest we can get to feeling time stop.”

 

Chanyeol hums in interest, and Baekhyun waits for him to say something, to interject his opinion like he always does. A few seconds pass in silence.

 

“He doesn’t need the money, you know,” Baekhyun says.

 

“I can tell,” Chanyeol says. He’s commented multiple times on all the luxuries in Baekhyun’s house.

 

“It’s a passion project,” Baekhyun continues, “a labour of love.” He doesn’t know why he’s stressing this so much. It makes no difference why it was made. But the notes. His father’s notes. They were beautiful. “He calls it a she,” Baekhyun murmurs.

 

“Did he ever finish her?”

 

“Yeah,” Baekhyun says in a breath, smiling brightly. 

 

He looks at Chanyeol with hopeful eyes. “Do you want to see?”

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

When he was younger, he couldn’t care less about dying. Chanyeol couldn’t either, for that matter. He resented that it was so widespread in media, that people couldn’t accept that their lives were fleeting when all the trends and problems they had were so much more so, and he felt a bitter satisfaction at being one of the few, it seemed, who didn’t fear death, who welcomed it, even. He wanted to shout from the rooftops, so loud the wind carried it across the ocean:  _ there’s no afterlife, and there doesn’t need to be _ , and it frustrated him that nobody would listen to him no matter how he tried to convey that message.

 

He also wanted attention, as was probably evident to almost everyone around him, and had such a starving need for it that it coloured all his decisions. All his actions, his friends, his thoughts, were designed to feed his voracious appetite, and this was just one example.

 

As he grew older, he learned to swallow that most vital pill:  _ you’re not special _ . It went down, barbed and bitter, and it drained the fire from his vengeful soul. He swallowed it again, and again, until he was on the brink of overdose. He was a pile of smouldering coal, and hated every moment his fire burned.

 

People aren’t afraid of death, he learned. By and large, the general population has gone through the same struggle he has, and those people whom he thought were living happily because they dozed in blissful ignorance were happy for the exact opposite reason. They had their trials and tribulations, and they knew they could face life head-on with their faces turned proudly towards the sun. Baekhyun, on the other hand, wanted to hide. All the time. That was at the core of his friendship with Chanyeol, he felt. They went through this transition together, going from feeling like life didn’t deserve them to realizing it was them who didn’t deserve life. The resentment and hatred they projected at the world turned inside out so fast they couldn’t pinpoint when it happened, laser-focused like light through a magnifying glass at themselves so it burned right through their pride and left them wounded and bleeding. They staunched their blood with apathy and it scabbed over, skin hard and rough and numb. And tonight, he peels it off. It clings, hanging onto his flesh, but he persists.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

The first thing Baekhyun does when he awakes in the tesseract is look for Chanyeol. He’s surrounded by nothing but white blankness, as far as he can tell, and he stands to look around. As he gets up, however, he notes how different it feels from standing on Earth. He feels weightless, in a way. He can feel his own presence, his own body solid under his hands as he pats himself up and down. He’s corporeal, as far as his conscious can tell, but every movement is blessed with a complete lack of effort. He can’t feel the weight of gravity on his shoulders pressing down every heel-toe. He can’t feel the drag of air following his every movement. Everything is smooth, streamlined, and strange.

 

There’s also perfect silence. It’s disconcerting, and he’s uneasy the moment he notices it. He’s so alone in this place that all the background noise he’s been accustomed to leaves a startling void behind. Within his body, too, he notices… nothing. Absolutely nothing. For a startling moment, he can’t hear air passing through his body as he breathes in. It’s almost like it isn’t happening. But, in the next breath out, the moment the emptiness is really about to set in, he hears the rush of air. So that’s how the manipulation works, he thinks. It happens as he wills it, within a moment of consciousness so fleeting it’s almost involuntary, just like moving his arms, just like wanting to hear himself breathe.

 

He finds Chanyeol a little ways away, and the distance he travels with every step changes unnervingly.

 

When he walks up behind Chanyeol, Chanyeol turns to find him brushing his hands through the air, soft white fur appearing between his fingers and disappearing the moment his hand passes.

 

Baekhyun’s hand drops, and he looks up at Chanyeol. He can’t help the smile that breaks out over his face. All the happiness hits him at once. His two obsessions trapped in one place. Chanyeol and immortality. Immortality and Chanyeol. They’re the same now, now that they’re going to be here forever. Chanyeol is immortality, and immorality is Chanyeol. There’s no point in differentiating between them. The thought of death weighed so heavily on Baekhyun’s mind, and now, seeing Chanyeol here safe with him, in this forever, he feels nothing but joy so light he could fly on it.

 

“I love you,” he says. Chanyeol and immortality. Immortality and Chanyeol. And love.

 

Chanyeol looks amused. “I love you too,” he responds.

 

They spend their first “day” exploring. It quickly becomes obvious that their priority is setting up an environment where time can be measured, and they bicker over reality.

 

“I think snowflakes are smaller than that,” Chanyeol says.

 

“The bigger the better,” Baekhyun replies, followed by a pointed look up and down the length of Chanyeol’s body.

 

Chanyeol laughs, and Baekhyun directs a few snowflakes onto Chanyeol’s eyelashes to decorate his pretty smile.

 

With the snow coming from the sky and the foggy white all around them Baekhyun and Chanyeol tried to complete the winter aesthetic with a ski resort, but without feeling the brisk wind or seeing an exhilarated flush to Chanyeol’s cheeks, Baekhyun quickly lost interest. They did, however, learn to create other people. The details on them weren’t clear and conversations were oddly predictable, but seeing people in bright downy jackets and ski goggles shuffling across the snow was equal parts cute and haunting. None of the people moved in common, restless ways. Adults didn’t compulsively look around themselves to keep track of their children, no one fiddled with their gloves or adjusted hold on their ski poles, and since the people only talked when Baekhyun or Chanyeol prompted them to, no one communicated with each other. It was like watching a line of northern zombies.

 

Chanyeol waves them away a disappointingly short time after they were conceived, and the two of them opt for a less clinical environment instead. They settle on a wooden cabin and a fireplace and a giant sofa with cushions so thick it’s hard to move. And they stay there because why would anyone want to move from such a place, anyway?

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

Baekhyun thaws. He was numb from the fear—he didn’t even know he was—and now he’s thawing, and he can feel  _ everything _ .

 

They don’t need to sleep. They don’t get tired mentally or physically. They don’t get anything physically anymore, actually. They’ve stopped feeling physical sensations, so there’s really just mental stuff left. All of it has been wonderful so far, though. The two of them spend all their time together, seemingly unable to stay apart, and Baekhyun just knew this was the right choice. The novelty of the airy sensation of a burden being lifted off his weary shoulders hasn’t faded away yet, and his lack of concern over his own mortality frees up his mental capacity to enjoy himself instead. Everything is fine. He can’t fucking believe it. Everything he does is okay because nothing he does matters because he’ll be here forever. It’s unconditional. It’s unconditional love from Chanyeol and unconditional love from the fake societies they’ve created and unconditional existence. 

 

Finally, Baekhyun feels like he’s enough.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

He dreams he’s composing a song with a room full of people. Friends, like Chanyeol, and people he’s never met before, personal heroes.

 

There’s an explosion somewhere in the city. He sees the flash from the window, but doesn’t register what it means until he’s hit by the shockwave. The room explodes with a dream-like quality. Baekhyun’s thrown backwards in slow-motion, and he watches a thin rectangle of sunlight from the window make its way down his body. The beam of light isn’t moving, but its highlight on him moves down as his body flies backwards from the explosion. He’s nearly completely horizontal, so the sunlight leaves his fingertips and travels down his knees, his ankles, before he crashes into the opposite wall and everything goes dark.

 

He wakes up an indeterminate amount of time later, seemingly unscathed, and looks around. There are no bodies, but there are things remaining. It’s the same room, but decades after. There’s a mix of dust and ashes covering everything in the building, and Baekhyun feels a yawning void expanding inside his chest as he looks at the unfinished sheet music that somehow remained unmoved, sitting primly on the grayed table.

 

He has a sudden lucid thought.  _ This will be the universe in a thousand years, but no one will be here to see it. _ He doesn’t know what it means. It doesn’t make sense in the context of his dream.

 

He wakes up with dried tears on his face.

 

Later, much later, he’ll come to recognize this dream as a vision. Like fate took pity on him and allowed him an impossible glimpse of a hypothetical future. That day though, he just stayed in bed, stared at Chanyeol, at the ceiling, at the opposite wall, and laid awake until he dozed off again. And everything was ok.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

Space depends on his perception of it, if he thinks he only took a few steps away from Chanyeol then he's still within arm’s reach of him. If he only took a few steps but gets some inkling that he's far away, then Chanyeol is suddenly a tiny blur. It’s a little scary, living in such an subjective universe. They never know what the time is, what the distance is, what things weigh. And being the only ones in there, if they aren’t certain, then nothing is. Nothing in their world is certain.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

They play hide-and-seek once, and it goes a little something like this: Baekhyun covers his eyes with his hands and counts, “one forever, two forevers, three forevers…” and so on. Chanyeol stands behind Baekhyun and forms a city. He builds massive skyscrapers with dingy apartment buildings that sit on top of convenience stores in between. He litters the streets with cigarette butts and trampled bus tickets, torn newspaper and muddy lottery tickets. He blasts noise, everywhere, from all directions, of cars and busses and bicycles and people, of laughter and chatter and store bell dings, and he makes the sky a husky pink with streaks of orange sherbet spilled across.

 

A short eternity later, Baekhyun opens his eyes and breathes in the beautiful sight. The streets are a little bit foggy, a quality that remains in every city they design, and people squeeze past him even though their incorporeal forms could easily just pass through. Baekhyun walks into a nearby convenience store. He walks through the aisles that are too tall for him to see the stuff on the top few shelves. He can’t read the labels on any of the chip bags, although he knows they’re there. The person behind the counter looks up from his newspaper. Baekhyun intuitively knows that she’s about thirty, although she looks a bit too young. Chanyeol’s never been good at getting ages right.

 

Baekhyun walks back out and looks around. There are two buildings that are a little more defined than the others. He goes inside. It’s much smaller on the inside with narrow stairs, dirty white, and he somehow knew there were elevators to his left (nevermind that there were no visible doors or signs to his left). He hesitates at the base of the stairs, then decides that time and energy is infinite for him anyway so there’s no point in not climbing them. After about 20 steps there’s a platform, and Baekhyun turns onto another flight of stairs. These ones are blurrier so he doesn’t bother climbing them, just climbs back down and exits.

 

Baekhyun notices a little alley between the two buildings, and it’s there that he finds Chanyeol, playing with a sleek black kitten that Baekhyun unfortunately can’t touch.

 

“It took you forever to find me,” Chanyeol says, rubbing the kitten’s ears.

 

“Good thing we have all the time in the world,” Baekhyun replies. 

 

Sometimes the subjectivity is nice, he decides.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

Is it really a world if there are no boundaries? It’s one of their less insane insane thoughts. Really, it just sounds like it could be philosophical. What marks the line between philosophy and insanity? Certainly not reason. Insanity is all about reason. Reason is what makes insanity insane, though it’s not something the sane like to believe in.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

There’s a moment when it breaks, and neither of them knows how long it took, but the worst part is that Baekhyun doesn’t think it was inevitable. Maybe, he tells himself afterwards, maybe they could have made it last. Maybe not an eternity, but if he had just had a little more patience, maybe he wouldn’t have hurt Chanyeol so badly.

 

The short of it is that Baekhyun pushes Chanyeol.

 

The long of it is that Baekhyun has never been the kind to maintain the pure and precious. He’s destructive, and he falls into his old habits of sabotage. It’s usually controlled, peeking out in his humor, his irreverence, his spontaneity. It’s part of what draws people to him; the intensity of his chaos changes lives - for better or worse. It’s what drew Chanyeol to him too. The way Baekhyun pushes limits is enough to bring out parts of him, brave, assertive parts of him, that he had buried for reasons he couldn’t seem to remember after meeting Baekhyun. Unfortunately, being the cause of change is a luxury Baekhyun had gotten used to.

 

It started simple. Baekhyun built things. Buildings turned on their heads, balancing on roofs. Buildings flipped inside out, furniture sitting on platforms held up by a central brick column. Imaginary lives lived for voyeurs. There were buildings whose walls you could sink your hands into, and buildings that you could let lost in forever if you wanted to.

 

Then it got worse. Chanyeol walked out one morning to come face to face with a crowd of humanoid creatures walking the streets of what could almost be mistaken for Seoul. They had disproportionately sized feet, arms, hips, necks. They had asymmetrical body parts that were different sizes and shapes on either side of their spines. They had heads that weighed just a few pounds too much, lolling to the sides as they walked. Some had the full 360° range of motion in every joint. And in the middle of it all, Baekhyun sat right in between lanes on the street and let cars pass by either side of him. It was the first time that Chanyeol felt afraid of Baekhyun, of this world. And it would not be the last.

 

Chanyeol talked to Baekhyun that night. He let his words come smooth and calm like his tongue laving over the cut of Baekhyun’s hips, and gently admonished him with a small, punishing bite on the inside of his thigh. And Baekhyun sighed with pleasure, pliant in his hands, and agreed not to make this place of magic a place of horrors. And things were okay. For a little while.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

“I don’t think this is good for us, Baek.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“It’s an echochamber. It’s a literal echochamber of what we want.”

 

“Yeah? And?”

 

“And I don't want to not care like you, Baek. I don't want to ignore the difference between what's real and what's not. I need to go back. I need to go back before I stop feeling like I belong in that world either because then I won’t belong anywhere."

 

“You didn’t belong there, though. You know that. Would you really have come in here with me if you felt like you belonged?”

 

“No, but…” Chanyeol pauses. Maybe for a second. Maybe for a hundred seconds. “It’s not good for us here. We’re not okay. You’re not okay. This is going to be the rest of our lives, Baek. We might be going insane without knowing it, and we have to spend another eternity here. That doesn’t scare you?”

 

Chanyeol and immortality, Baekhyun thinks. “But I… love. You.” He says it too haltingly. The intonation is wrong but he doesn’t remember what’s right. “Doesn’t our love mean anything to you?”

 

“Does anything mean anything in here? Does love exist if it’s not relative? If I’m the only one here, I’m the only one you can love. Or hate. Or anything. So do you love me at all?”

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

They go insane from all the emptiness. Without daylight helping him keep track of time, without anything to occupy his hands or mind with, without anyone around to remind him of the incident, time warps and feelings fade and pretty soon Baekhyun is struggling to believe that his life was real in the first place.

 

Baekhyun doesn't sleep anymore. Not because he wants to stay up. There’s no reason to stay awake at night anymore. There's nothing to do, no songs to write, no beats to mix. Who would listen to his music? Sometimes, when Baekhyun does sleep, he wakes up gasping. Gasping as he realizes that everything he's doing is a lie. Everyone is in the middle of dying, and they're living in an endless expanse of time, in an infinitesimally small space, and nothing he does is real. What's real is what's out there. And what's out there is coming. Too soon, yet never soon enough.

 

Baekhyun eventually realizes that his obsessive, all-consuming love for Chanyeol is in part due to his fear of the unknown. In an event like the apocalypse, he latches on even harder to the familiar, onto Chanyeol, but in the tesseract, Chanyeol suddenly feels like just another part of the abyss. Just another thing open for manipulation. 

____________________________________________________________________

 

The short of it is that Baekhyun pushes Chanyeol.

 

They’re blissed out in the glorious daylight. Bubbles float up and down and fall apart on their bared skin in iridescent puddles as they lie on the roof of a modern skyscraper. Baekhyun is forehead to forehead with Chanyeol, and there’s something he just can’t figure out. 

 

Chanyeol’s face. It has on such an odd expression.

 

His usual lovely, ruddy geniality is replaced by warped panic. Some of his features move faster than others. His eyes are wide, unblinking, and Baekhyun imagines them popping out of their sockets. His cheeks glow beautifully under rainbow light diffused from the iridescent bubbles above. And his mouth. It’s open. Gasping. A continuous prayer for air as Baekhyun’s hands continue to press against his windpipe.

 

It’s so odd. They don’t need air, and Chanyeol has definitely held his breath longer than a regular person should without realizing. So why is he gasping? They didn’t come in here to escape death—their bodies are still vulnerable out in the real world—they came here to escape their fear of death, knowing they won’t experience it. So why is Chanyeol still afraid he might die of asphyxiation?

 

Baekhyun lets go of Chanyeol’s throat. 

 

In the split second Chanyeol’s too relieved to notice, Baekhyun pushes him off the roof, and Chanyeol screams as he falls.

 

Baekhyun laughs. 

 

The short of it is that Chanyeol finds something he fears more than death.

____________________________________________________________________

 

The scenery outside changes, and Baekhyun is looking out at the city from the top floor of his father’s penthouse. Chanyeol sits next to him, and they gaze out the window together. The spherical domes become three-dimensional holograms at night; the iridescent, transparent material can’t be seen in the dark, and enclosed within the boundaries of the dome are characters, advertisements, messages appearing as multicoloured lights playing against the dark background. Baekhyun watches a popular movie trailer play in three dimensions, the hologram throwing strange patterns of light into the night sky.

 

“You ruined the sky,” Chanyeol murmurs.

 

Baekhyun does not turn away from the window. “What do you mean?” he asks.

 

“You put the focus on all these lights. But the sky deserves its own admiration.” With a sweep of his hand, the lights disappear until they just look like a vague, pulsating afterimage of the previous brightness. Against his will, Baekhyun’s eyes stay fixed on the blackness of night. The abyss is equal parts mesmerizing and terrifying, like he’s looking into the eye of a massive serpent. It’s like looking at death. It’s like dying.

 

He can’t breathe.

 

He can’t feel Chanyeol’s presence anymore. He can’t conjure the city up again; he needs Yeol to take the darkness away. Baekhyun blinks—or, maybe he doesn’t, because he can’t tell anymore, he can’t see with his eyes closed and he can’t see with his eyes open. It’s absolutely fucking terrifying, and for several, awful, long, breathless moments, he thinks he’s dead.

 

He screams.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

He understands it now. Baekhyun understands that what he was afraid of all along was not death, but the unknown. But nothing is unknown with Yeol. Even now, when Chanyeol is nowhere to be found, Baekhyun understands why. And that’s why he leaves. Every part of his body screams for Chanyeol, wants to hug and love and make Chanyeol understand, so he leaves. The universe could end in the next ten minutes or the next ten days, and Baekhyun wouldn’t care. He’s effectively lost everything anywhere, and he will never, never get it back.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

The buzz in his ears organizes itself into a recognizable sound. It’s sizzling. Of all the sounds that Baekhyun thought he would remember from his life, he didn’t think it would be this one. His thoughts are jumbled, muffled, like pulling cotton apart, but he thinks just maybe he feels betrayed. He thinks, he  _ thinks _ he thinks, there’s some sort of injustice in the last sound he hears being this. There have been so many better sounds in his life. He can’t remember them, but he knows they were there. If he had to die listening to something, it should have been something from  _ that _ person. Chanyeol? Yes, that’s right. His thoughts are muddy, but he’s spent so much time thinking about Chanyeol that the name, the memories, come like second nature.

 

There was music. He knows that. He surrounded himself with music, blanketed himself with beautiful sounds and a beautiful person who lived in those sounds just as much as he does. But they aren’t here with him. In his last moments, those sounds aren’t here to accompany him. That person isn’t here to accompany him. He tries to remember Chanyeol’s voice. The sound itself doesn’t quite reach him over the deafening sound of something burning, but the feelings reach him immediately. The sensation of deep rumbles against one ear, the comfort of listening to him talk when his long arms held Baekhyun against his chest. Listening to his laugh across a tiny cafe table. His soft melodic singing, his deft fingers plucking Baekhyun’s heartstrings along. The sounds don’t reach Baekhyun, but the feelings surge and envelop him.

 

The sound of sizzling morphs, too. There are a thousand reasons to fear this sound, but Baekhyun thinks of none of them. Thinking only of Chanyeol, he imagines other voices glazed over it. He thinks of a restaurant, sitting on bar stools right in front of the chef at his grill, smelling mouth-watering food and wiping off the sweat collecting on his forehead. He thinks of summer barbeques, of swatting away flies that crowded around his burger.

 

He does not think of his own burning flesh. He does not think of the world ending.

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

They’re just a handful of crumbled leaves tossed to the wind. If someone somehow, impossibly, survived, and could slice that moment in time impossibly thin and wedge it between two pieces of glass and under a microscope, they would be privy to trillions of thoughts unspoken, confessions unheard, and secrets that weren’t supposed to die secrets. Wounds smarting with regret, hatred left to fester, and entire lifetimes lived in fear that could have been lived in love. These were all fleeting, in the end. But if that someone could just hear a few of these last assertions, some of the last words of comfort told to friends and lovers and paper and their own frazzled selves, maybe they would find comfort in the things that they heard.

 

_ "Do you think the end will look the same as when everything first began? Sunsets and sunrises aren't too different after all." _

 

_ “The end isn’t terrible. I don’t know what the worst thing in the world is, but I don’t think it’s this.” _

 

_ “The worst part about the end is how anti-climactic it is. You wait so long for it to come, you spend hours preparing, you think up scenarios for where you're going to be when it happens. But when the very last moment hits, it really just can't come fast enough.” _


End file.
